Saturday, August 29, 2015

Au Revoir, Au Revoir, You Probably Don't Even Know What That Means

Irony--an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.

I've had a really hard week. Really hard. Harder than I've had in a long, long time.

For the first matter of hard, on Tuesday I got divorced. If you read my blog, you probably don't think that's a very big deal. You probably think I've entirely moved on and am super happy about things being over, and while yes, I'm happy to finally be able to move on once and for all, I'm not happy about saying an anticlimactic goodbye to somebody who was in more than half of my life, someone I kissed goodnight probably 6,500 times (times of separation and everyday fights were taken into account when calculations were made) between 1994 and 2014, someone I have two children with, someone I used to love. I'm not happy that relationship has evolved to a text-only relationship because my (not soon-to-be, not almost, but actual) ex-husband never wants to hear my voice again, that my sort-of happily ever after ended up not happy in the least, that for the first time in almost forever, I'm entirely alone. I'm not at all happy about any of those things.

But don't--really, don't!--think I think I've made a mistake. On Tuesday night, when I cried for the first time since last summer about all this; when I listened to the playlist I made about Glenn over a year ago, Songs That Make Me Want to Kill Myself; when, in my emotional, nostalgic funk, I picked up some old pictures lying around in an attempt to feed the sadness, instead of feeding it, and being all, Oh! I remember when we did this! And Omg, look at this picture of us in Chicago! We'll never go there together anymore, what went through my mind was, There I am, pregnant in Chicago. This is the time Glenn tried to kiss my sister, and There I am, with Glenn and my best friend when we were younger. He was fucking her right around the time this picture was taken. And I knew I didn't make a mistake. I knew I didn't feel sadness for the person I lost or the specific relationship that was over but for the unexpected, unwanted turn taken in my life.

Speaking of which--

In my last post, I wrote about the best time of my life, the summer when I was twelve, and the best time of my adult life, the summer that just passed. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned something about this before, but that summer, the one I was twelve, the best time of my life? It came to a screeching halt right around September 5 when those friends I loved so much and spent every minute with decided they no longer wanted me in their lives. The friendships that had meant so much, that had given me so much not only were gone, but in true twelve-and-thirteen-year-old-mean-girl style, they decided to make my life hell by starting horrible rumors about me and getting pretty much every person at HD Perry Middle to take part in my ostracization (because you know, abandoning me completely wasn't awful enough).

Well, this past summer, the one I loved so much? A lot of it was because of my new found independence, yes, but another big part of it came from a group of friends, who, while nowhere near as close of friends as that group of friends I had when I was twelve--one of them is North Star, after all--were maybe just as significant, maybe not for any reason other than the time they appeared in my life and what was happening during it, but really for reasons I can't--or choose not to--explain at all. Really, you probably wouldn't get it even if I did.

But, anyway, those friends? I guess mean girls don't have to be twelve and thirteen. Or, for that matter, girls at all.